The colour difference between allied sov (pink) and enemy sov (orange) is a bit too similar, while the stronger colours of moving units are much clearer.

The red "box" in the mini map does not correspond to the the area displayed by the main map. The centre of the map appears to line up with the top of the "box" (Y axis) The X axis looks ok. (full screen mode)

When not in full screen mode, the red box does not show in the mini map and therefore you can't navigate to the south by clicking in the mini map.

No diplo units are visible in the new UI yet.

Trade units are now displayed for both outward and return journeys, although while harvesting they display as race type, same as a military encampment, rather than gatherer type.

I think we need to wait for the UIv4 to be properly finished. The feedback can assist in refining and checking it. Can't fault the devs for asking the players to test it out. Only time will tell if this is akin to the microsoft menus vs ribbons saga in terms of user acceptance. I hate the ribbons BTW and still use word and excel from xp days. Once more of it is plumbed in I'll take it for a proper test drive.

I agree with Dung and am reserving my overall decision on it until a lot more of it is finished. I do like that we are being given a chance at this stage to review and comment on it. It also gives me a great opportunity to look at possible tools and how I can code them which in turn means that (hopefully) there will be at least core tools available when it goes fully live.

I do not agree with "wait until it is done to provide feedback" as the whole point of an alpha is to get reactions and comments from us, the players.

For the good:Full size screen is clearly awesome. The speed of load and scroll is great. Stained glass UI elements are cool and interesting. Using popups for all menus makes sense considering the UI is full screen.

Now the comments. I wont mention obvious things that are missing like screens & choices and focus instead on what is currently implemented.

1) Left click on map opening an "action menu" popup is annoying. I just want to move the map around and randomly clicking on it is habit since it is the entire screen. Windows UI paradigm is to open that menu with a right click instead and left click is just distracting.

2) The "action menu" showing the terrain type is redundant to the upper right "current square" information area so it can be removed without losing anything. I would just keep it as the right click action menu to send diplo, troop, etc.

3) The "action menu" should remove "send resources" unless it is on something it is possible to send resources to. Same applies to other relevant actions.

4) With the map being so large and easily scrolled, a "center in map" choice is not useful enough to dedicate an entry in the menu.

5) When you hover over a sov square it gives information about it in the "map info" area, specifically the city name. However when you hover over the city itself, the info area does not show the city name.

6) Moving units and camps are not clickable. Even if you dont have any details about them my impulse is to click them and the fact I cannot feels annoying.

2. The background texture on the map is too noisy. The pattern burns after images into my retinas that persist for almost a minute after looking away.

The old map looks much cleaner.

3. The map doesn't remember the last position and zoom level.

4. The icons on the left are semi transparent, which adds more noise to their already noisy design.

5. There's no way to resize the popup panel. It has always bothered me how you can't resize the notifications panel in the old version, but now that you made it even smaller, it has become completely useless. If it's to remain a fixed size, it needs to be at least 4x as tall. That, or be freely resizeable.

-There are obviously a lot of submenus in overview and city map that don't exist yet. Search, friends, mail, etc. also seem to not work yet. The more I look, tons of menus don't work or exist yet so I won't comment more on those. I do hope every menu we currently have gets shoved in somewhere--over the years a lot of handy things have been added.

-Random center drift by zooming out and in again is weird/bad.

-Hard to Tell NAP/confed/etc. I believe the colors are messed up. I see my town green-ish, confed green, some NAPs green but some are yellow for some reason? My alliance towns are now.. pink? FYI, my color vision is normal. Colors need to be distinct and consistent.

-Please add the standard options in a reachable place to remove/add terrain/encampments/towns etc. The new map is pretty but even the normal simple map is too crowded for many purposes so it is handy to turn things off when you don't want them.

-Because menus can now be left all over the screen, super useful would be a button in the upper corner to shrink/close all menus. This way if you want to see the whole screen you could do so without having to close/shrink 3 different menus. We are used to being able to go to map with 1 button press so this would be similar. Also, is there any reason you can't open a city view and a trade view at once? In the current UI there is no room, but in the new UI there is clearly room if you have a big monitor. It would be also nice if we could resize the non-chat menus, though the multiple windows open at once would be handy even without that.

-As others have said, it is slow/kind of hard to switch between cities right now.

-When the city view window pops up, it is a bit jarring visually and retro looking even though it is what we are used to seeing. The other menus which currently exist (such as the training menu) meld reasonably well with the new art/UI. The city view though really just looks like older art in a square in a bigger square in an even bigger square of a different style. For some reason you suddenly expect to be able to move around the city view or zoom in etc. I don't really have a suggestion here, just a comment that it is aesthetically jarring.

-Overall, it looks pretty. The animation when you are automatically sweeping along the map to a location is gorgeous. And the long npc arrows are nice. Once it is finalized I think it will take awhile to get used to and many people will complain because it is different, but I bet most people will like it when they get used to it.

I do not agree with "wait until it is done to provide feedback" as the whole point of an alpha is to get reactions and comments from us, the players.

I concur. In fact GM Stormcrow actually asked for feedback -

FEEDBACK

We'd very much like your feedback, suggestions and bug reports; please submit these either as petitions in the old UIv3 - or as comments in the relevant subject thread in the forum. We really, really want to hear what you think.

This is a massive update, and this is just the alpha test, the first look at the partially complete UI. There are bound to be things that don't work as expected, and the more eyes on, the quicker any issues are picked up. I notice some of the issues previously mention have already been addressed

So, a bit more feedback.

Sov.

The sov is hard to see on many forest tiles without the border, especially yellow or green colours.

There are some inconsistencies in sov colour. Whilst blue for own cities and pink-ish for alliance cities looks consistent, the green for confed cities is not. Most confed cities have green sov, but some have yellow, even from within the same alliance. In fact there are a couple of cities I see with both yellow and green sov tiles.

Watching all the activity during a siege is much more engaging, with much more information on screen than before. Seeing the race of moving units, their diplomatic status as well as the eta and target tile when close is a nice touch. Of course, when there are a lot of movements close together, some of the details are hard to see. Fog of war I guess.

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